Lent Term 2020 Modern and Contemporary Literature MPhil: Option Course

Lent Term 2020

Modern and Contemporary Literature MPhil: Option Course

Victorian Work Ethics: Labour in the Literary Imagination, 1830-
1914

                    Convenor: Dr Marcus Waithe (Magdalene)

Lent Term 2020
Time: TBC
Location: TBC

Introduction: Inspired by recent critical interest in the Victorian period’s various
‘work ethics’, this course examines the troubled relationship between literature and
the activity we call ‘work’. It first considers the origins of the so-called ‘Gospel of
Labour’ popularized in Britain in the 1840s and 1850s. Attention then turns to
Ruskin’s idealized portrait of the artisan, and to cases of rebellion from that
orthodoxy: notably, the morbid abstention of Herman Melville’s Bartleby and the
‘polite’ opt-outs of Dickens’s Mr Skimpole. Week 4 considers the discontents of
authorship, and the scope for seeing writing itself as an honourable ‘labour’. In the
last two weeks, we address later re-formulations of work, in particular the idea of
‘craft’ as a rejuvenated professional, literary, and human value, and the reconciliation
of material and transcendent experience in the utopian visions of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth century. Students taking this course will develop their
understanding of a key Victorian ‘value’, and will acquire detailed knowledge of work
by leading writers and thinkers of the period. It is hoped that the course will also
prompt fruitful comparative reflection on the meanings of ‘work’ in our own economy
of values.

Course Structure: 6 x 1.5 hr seminars running Weeks 1-6 of Lent Term. Each week
there will be either one or two student-led presentations.

Course Admin: Much of the administration will be carried out through a Moodle site
dedicated to the course, to which you will be signed up once your choice of course is
confirmed. Some items of core and contextual reading will be posted on the site in
PDF format.

Preparation: (i) The ‘Core Reading’ listed for each seminar is the compulsory
minimum, and should be studied in detail in preparation for seminars; (ii) ‘Contextual
Sources’ may be drawn on in discussion, and they may be useful in guiding further
research, but you need not read them cover-to-cover; (iii) A list of ‘Secondary
Reading’ is supplied for guidance.

Essays: Any essays written for this course must bear a clear relation to its themes
and historical scope. You are encouraged to formulate your own question in
consultation with me.

Schedule of Topics:
Week 1      Labour Theories of Value
Week 2      The Dignity of (Manual) Labour
Week 3      Sluggards and Slackers
Week 4      Literary Labourers
Week 5      Craft Ethics
Week 6      Utopian Labour and the ‘New Life’

Interdisciplinary Research Environment: Event listings, and other important
information relating to Nineteenth-Century Studies in the University, will appear on
the Faculty’s Research Group for Nineteenth-Century Studies:

•  For your purposes, the most important listing is ‘The Nineteenth Century
   Graduate Seminar’:

Week 1. Labour Theories of Value
Thomas Carlyle defended the unemployed masses in Chartism (1839), citing the
injustice they suffered in being denied work by an ‘idle’ ruling class. By 1850, his tune
had changed – in that year, he launched a notorious attack on those supposedly
guilty of refusing work. In this opening seminar, we will consider the origins of
Carlyle’s ‘Gospel of Labour’. Why did ‘work’ acquire such an overdetermined
significance in the period? In what sense was the honouring of work a distinctly
Victorian phenomenon? What (if any) criticisms were levelled against this gathering
orthodoxy?

Core Reading / Visual Sources
    • Thomas Carlyle, Chartism (1839) (any edition)
    • Extract from Thomas Carlyle, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850) (PDF supplied)
    • J. S. Mill, ‘The Negro Question’ (January, 1850) (PDF supplied)
    • Ford Madox Brown, Work, oil, 1852-65, Manchester Art Gallery

Contextual Sources
  • Extracts from three labour theorists: Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx
      (PDFs supplied)
  • Samuel Smiles, Self-Help (1859) (any edition)
  • John Ruskin, ‘Work’, The Crown of Wild Olive (1866) (PDF supplied)

Secondary Reading
Anthony, P. D., The Ideology of Work (London: Tavistock Publications, 1977)
Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition, 2nd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago
       Press, 1958)
Briggs, Asa, ‘Samuel Smiles and the Gospel of Labour’, in Victorian People: A
       Reassessment of Persons and Themes 1851-67 (Harmondsworth: Penguin
       Books, 1971) (1955), pp. 124-147
Carlisle, Janice, Picturing Reform in Victorian Britain (Cambridge University Press,
       2012) (see chapter on ‘Representing Labor’)
Houghton, Walter, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale
       University Press, 1957), pp. 242-262 (‘4. Work’, in Chapter 10 on
       ‘Earnestness’)
Lesjak, Carolyn, Working Fictions: A Genealogy of the Victorian Novel (Durham:
       Duke University Press, 2006)
Thomas, Keith, The Oxford Book of Work (Oxford: OUP, 1999)
Swift, Roger, ‘Thomas Carlyle, Chartism, and the Irish in Early Victorian England’,
       Victorian Literature and Culture (2001), 67-83

Week 2. The Dignity of (Manual) Labour
In Week 2, we will consider Ruskin’s account of the creative free expression
supposedly enjoyed by the medieval cathedral builders. Ruskin wanted to rehabilitate
manual labour, and he challenged the assumption that ‘liberal’ occupations were
more honourable than those employing the hands. We will consider the legacy of this
Romantic labour tradition in Hopkins’s ‘Harry Ploughman’, and in Thomas Hardy’s
Jude the Obscure (1896), a novel that offers a mixture of sympathetic and critical
commentary on Ruskin’s vision of inspired stonemasons.

Core Reading
   • John Ruskin, ‘The Nature of Gothic’ (from The Stones of Venice, Vol. 2)
      (1853) (PDF supplied)
   • Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘Harry Ploughman’ (PDF provided)
   • Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1896), ed. by Patricia Ingham (Oxford:
      Oxford UP, 2002)

Contextual Sources
  • J. Nash, ‘Amateur Navvies at Oxford – Undergraduates Making a Road as
      Suggested by Mr Ruskin’, The Graphic in 1874 (PDF Supplied)
  • Elliott & Fry studio, ‘Gladstone Chopping wood’, photograph, (c. 1889) (PDF
      Supplied)
  • Ilya Repin, Portrait of Leo Tolstoy as a Ploughman on a Field, 1887, oil on
      canvas, The Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia (viewable via a Google
      image search)

Secondary Reading
Anthony, P. D., John Ruskin’s Labour: A Study of Ruskin’s Social Theory
       (Cambridge: CUP, 1983)
Barringer, Tim, Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (New Haven: Yale
       University Press, 2005)
Beatty, C. J.P, The Architectural Notebook of Thomas Hardy (Dorchester: Dorset
       Natural History and Archaeological Society, 1966)
Bromell, Nicholas Knowles, By the Sweat of the Brow: Literature and Labor in
       Antebellum America (London: University of Chicago Press, 1993)
Danahay, Martin, Gender at Work in Victorian Culture: Literature, Art and Masculinity
       (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005)
Heinzelman, Kurt, ‘The Uneducated Imagination: Romantic Representations of
       Labor’, At the Limits of Romanticism, ed. by Mary Favret and Nicola Watson
       (Indiana UP, 1994), 101-124
Hughes, John, The End of Work: Theological Critiques of Capitalism (Oxford:
       Blackwell, 2007)
Waithe, Marcus, ‘William Barnes: Views of Field Labour in Poems of Rural Life’, in
       The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry, ed. by Matthew Bevis (Oxford:
       Oxford University Press, 2013)

Week 3. Sluggards and Slackers
In Week 3, we will consider the scandal and the appeal of the Victorian ‘refusenik’.
To what extent were sluggards and slackers a necessary function of the ‘Gospel of
Labour’? Were they simply the reverse side of the coin, or harbingers of a real
alternative? What connections form between mid-Victorian portraits of idleness and
Aestheticism’s later privileging of sensory experience over production?

Core Reading
   • Herman Melville, ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ (1853) (PDF supplied)
   • Extracts from Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853) (PDF supplied)
   • Isaac Watts, ‘The Sluggard’, The Divine and Moral Songs for the Use of
      Children (1715) (PDF supplied)
   • Lewis Carroll’s spoof of ‘The Sluggard’ in Alice in Wonderland (1865) (PDF
      supplied)

Contextual Sources
  • Tennyson, ‘The Lotos-Eaters’ (1831 / 1842)
  • Last chapter of Walter Pater, The Renaissance (1873)
  • Marius the Epicurean (1885)

Secondary Reading
* Aldeman, Richard, Idleness, Contemplation and the Aesthetic, 1750-1830
        (Cambridge: CUP, 2011)
Baudrillard, Jean, The Mirror of Production, trans. by Mark Poster (St Louis: Telos
        Press, 1975)
Danon, Ruth, Work in the English Novel: The Myth of Vocation (London: Croom
        Helm, 1985)
Dellamora, Richard, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism
        (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990)
Dowling, Linda, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca: Cornell
        University Press, 1994)
Gagnier, Regenia, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public
        (Stanford University Press, 1986)
Gleason, William A., The Leisure Ethic: Work and Play in American Literature, 1840-
        1940 (Stanford UP, 1999)
Hibbitt, Richard, Dilettantism and its Values: From Weimar Classicism to the Fin de
        Siècle (Oxford: Legenda, 2006)
Weber, Max, The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. by Talcott
        Parsons, ed. by Anthony Giddens (London: Routledge, 2001)
Weisbuch, Robert, ‘Dickens, Melville, and a Tale of Two Countries’, in The
        Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel, ed. by Deirdre David
        (Cambridge: CUP, pp. 234-254)

Week 4. Literary Labourers
Isaac D’Israeli wrote that ‘to meditate, to compose, to read and to be tranquil, should
be called working.’ How have writers projected and problematised their labours
against a changing understanding of what it means to ‘work’? Have they operated at
a remove from dominant modes and measures of productivity or sought an
accommodation? In what sense is literary activity poised between labour and
idleness? We will consider Carlyle’s attempt to cast the Sheffield poet, Ebenezer
Elliot (author of Corn Law Rhymes), as a kind of literary artisan; we will also address
the forms of morbidity that George Eliot explores in her portrait of Mr Casaubon, and
that George Gissing associates with the trials of authorship in The New Grub Street
(1891).

Core Reading
   • Thomas Carlyle, ‘Corn-Law Rhymes’ (essay from The Edinburgh Review)
      (1832) (PDF provided)
   • Extracts from George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871-2) (PDF provided)
   • George Gissing, The New Grub Street (1891), ed. by John Goode (Oxford:
      OUP, 2008)

Contextual Sources
  • Extracts from Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (1856) (PDF provided)
  • Isaac D’Israeli, The Literary Character, Illustrated by The History of Men of
      Genius, Drawn from their own Feelings and Confessions (1795) (1818 edition)
      (see Google Books http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=cm-
      daCKOZg8C&dq=Isaac%20D%E2%80%99Israeli%2C%20The%20Literary%2
      0Character&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q&f=false)
  • Philip Hammerton, The Intellectual Life (1873) (available in the UL rare books
      room, or on Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/32151)

Secondary Reading
Heyck, T. W., The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England (Croom
         Helm, 1982)
Pettitt, Clare, Patent Inventions: Intellectual Property and the Victorian Novel (Oxford:
         OUP, 2004)
Nuttall, A. D., Dead from the Waist Down: Scholars and Scholarship in the Popular
         Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003)
Salmon, Richard, The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession (Cambridge:
         Cambridge University Press, 2013)
---, ‘Authorship’ in Henry James in Context, ed. David McWhirter (Cambridge:
         Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 105-114
Waithe, Marcus, ‘The Pen and the Hammer: Thomas Carlyle, Ebenezer Elliott, and
         the “active poet”’, in Class and the Canon: Constructing Labouring-Class
         Poetry and Poetics, 1780-1900, ed. by Mina Gorjii and Kirstie Blair
         (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013)
---, '"Another sort of writing"? Invalidism and Poetic Labour in the Letters of Elizabeth
         Barrett', in Letter Writing Among Poets: From William Wordsworth to Elizabeth
         Bishop, ed. Jonathan Ellis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), pp.
         126-140
---, and Claire White, eds, The Labour of Literature in Britain and France, 1830-1910:
         Authorial Work Ethics (London: Palgrave, 2018)

Week 5. Craft Ethics
Richard Sennett writes that ‘“Craftsmanship” may suggest a way of life that waned
with the advent of industrial society – but this is misleading.’ ‘Craftsmanship’, he
contends, ‘names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for
its own sake’. The origins of this hesitation between ‘craft’ understood as a redundant
working practice, and ‘craft’ as a human virtue or moral standard, can be traced to its
self-conscious revival as a ‘complex word’ in the late nineteenth century. This revival
is most obvious in William Morris’s championing of the applied arts; it also informed
the values that Charles Dickens and George Eliot invested in the life of the forge and
the workshop. Was the return to ‘craft’ merely a nostalgic impulse, or a viable path to
social transformation?

Core Reading
   • Essays by William Morris: ‘The Revival of Handicraft’ (1888); ‘Art and its
      Producers’ (1888); ‘The Arts and Crafts Today’ (1889) (PDFs provided)
   • Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘Felix Randal’ (PDF provided)

Contextual Sources
  • Extracts from Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861) (PDF provided)
  • Oscar Wilde, ‘Mr Morris on Tapestry’, Pall Mall Gazette, 2 November 1888
      (PDF provided)
  • George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859)

Secondary Reading
Blakesley, Rosalind, The Arts and Crafts Movement (London: Phaidon Press, 2009)
Chambers, Susan, ‘Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Kinesthetics of Conviction’,
        Victorian Studies, 51.1 (Autumn, 2008), 7-35
Crawford, Matthew B., Shop Class as Soulcraft (London: Penguin, 2010)
Droth, Martina, ‘The Ethics of Making: Craft and English Sculptural Aesthetics, c.
        1851-1900’, Journal of Design History, 17.3 (2004)
Hughes, John, The End of Work: Theological Critiques of Capitalism (Oxford:
        Blackwell, 2007)
Humiliata, Mary, ‘Hopkins and the Prometheus Myth’, PMLA, 70.1 (1955), 58-68
Kaplan, Wendy and Elizabeth Cumming, The Arts and Crafts Movement (London:
        Thames & Hudson, 1991)
Leslie, Esther, ‘Walter Benjamin: Traces of Craft’, Journal of Design History, 11.1
        (1998), 5-13
MacCarthy, Fiona, The Simple Life: C. R. Ashbee in the Cotswolds (University of
        California Press, 1981)
Muthesius, Stefan, ‘Hankwerk/Kunsthandwerk’, Journal of Design History, 11.1
        (1998), 85-95
Osteen, Mark, ‘The Great Expectations of Stephen Dedalus’, James Joyce Quarterly,
        41.1/2 (Fall, 2003), 169-183
Schaffer, Talia, Novel Craft: Victorian Domestic Handicraft & Nineteenth-Century
        Fiction (Oxford: OUP, 2011)
Sennett, Richard, The Craftsman (London: Penguin, 2008)
Waithe, Marcus, Ruskin and Craftsmanship (The Ruskin Lecture, 2015) (York: Guild
        of St George, 2015)
---, 'Ruskin's Cultural Legacies', in The Cambridge Companion to John Ruskin, ed.
        Francis O'Gorman (Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 263-278

Week 6. Utopian Labour and ‘the New Life’
William Morris followed Ruskin in regarding fulfilling work as a necessary component
of human happiness. His vision of the utopian future – like that of Henry Thoreau
before him, and Edward Carpenter after – placed a reformed labour process centre-
stage. Olive Schreiner champions a related logic in Woman and Labour (1911),
advancing work-based claims to contentment for her own sex. We will consider an
alternative view in Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ (1891). Wilde’s
essay makes a case for the inspired leisure made possible by machines. What
assumptions are at stake in these differing conceptions of the relationship between
work and human welfare?

Core Reading
   • Morris, News from Nowhere (1890), in Clive Wilmer, News from Nowhere and
      Other Writings (London: Penguin, 2004)
   • Oscar Wilde, ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ (1891) (PDF supplied)
   • Extracts from Olive Schreiner, Woman and Labour (1911) (PDF supplied)

Contextual Sources
  • Extracts from Edward Carpenter, Towards Democracy (1883-1902) (PDF
      supplied); My Days and Dreams: Being Autobiographical Notes (London:
      George Allen and Unwin, 1916)
  • Henry Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854)

Secondary Reading
Armytage, W.H.G., Heavens Below: Utopian Experiments in England 1560-1960
       (London: Rouledge & Kegan Paul, 1961)
Beevers, Robert, The Garden City Utopia: A Critical Biography of Ebenezer Howard
       (London: Macmillan, 1988)
Brown, Tony, Edward Carpenter and Late Victorian Radicalism (London: Cass, 1990)
Cary, John, ed., The Faber Book of Utopias (London: Faber & Faber, 1999)
Faulkner, Peter, Against the Age: An Introduction to William Morris (London: Allen &
       Unwin, 1980)
Glass, Stanley Thomas, The Responsible Society: The Ideas of the English Guild
       Socialist (London: Longmans, 1966)
Goodwin, Barbara, Social Science and Utopia: Nineteenth-Century Models of Social
       Harmony (Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1978)
Grennan, Margaret R., William Morris: Medievalist and Revolutionary (New York:
       King’s Crown Press, 1945)
Hadjiafxendi, Kyriaki and Patricia Zakreski, eds, What is a Woman to Do? A Reader
       on Women, Work and Art, c. 1830-1890 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011)
Hutchinson, Frances, The Political Economy of Social Credit and Guild Socialism
       (Jon Carpenter, 2005)
Kumar, Krishan, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
       1987)
Marsh, J., Back to the Land: The Pastoral Impulse in Victorian England from 1880-
       1914 (London: Quartet Books, 1982)
Rowbothan, Sheila, Socialism and the New Life: The Personal and Sexual Politics of
       Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis (London: Pluto Press, 1977)
Thompson, E. P., William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, rev. edn (London:
       Merlin Press, 1977)

Waithe, Marcus, William Morris’s Utopia of Strangers: Victorian Medievalism and the
      Ideal of Hospitality (Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2006)